Where were you

POV: Matteo

He was gone before I woke.

I found the empty space in the bed first, sheets cold, and then the note on his desk, three lines in his own hand, giving me nothing. Called away. Don't wait up. Handle the council correspondence in my absence. Not even his name at the bottom, like he couldn't spare the effort of signing it.

I stood there holding that note longer than it deserved, and something in me that had bent quietly for two years finally didn't bend the same way.

"He just left," I said to Sofia later that morning, my voice flatter than I meant it to sound. "No explanation. Not even to my face. A note telling me to handle correspondence, like I'm his secretary and not his husband."

"You are kind of his secretary," Sofia said, careful, testing whether I could take the joke.

"I know what I am," I said. "I built it myself, remember? I just didn't think two years in he'd still be treating me like the job description is the whole relationship."

She didn't argue that. She just refilled my tea and let me sit with it, which was its own kind of mercy.

The first day passed in the ordinary rhythm I'd trained myself into. Correspondence. Household accounts. A council query about winter provisions that I answered without needing to ask him a single thing, because I'd been running half this pack in his silences for two years and I was good at it.

But underneath the rhythm, something else was working. The words from outside his study door two nights ago hadn't stopped turning over in my head. If he finds out I moved them, this ends both of us. Patrol schedules that didn't match what was reported to the council. Dave's voice, afraid in a way I'd never heard from him before.

By the second day, the ordinary rhythm wasn't enough to hold the anger down anymore.

"I want the patrol logs," I told the record-keeper in the east wing archive, keeping my voice level, the same voice I used for every household task that was technically none of my business and entirely my business anyway. "The full ones. Not just the summaries sent to council."

She hesitated. "Lord Callahan usually reviews those directly, sir."

"Lord Callahan isn't here," I said. "I am. Bring me the logs."

She brought them.

I spent the whole afternoon at the study desk, cross-referencing dates, comparing what had gone to the council against the raw entries logged by the border teams themselves. It was tedious work, the kind of work nobody had ever thanked me for doing, the same invisible labor that had made me indispensable and unloved in equal measure for two straight years.

And it was exactly that invisible labor that let me find it.

The gap sat in the third week of last month. Four patrol shifts logged as completed, verified, signed off — except the handwriting on two of those entries didn't match the patrol captain's usual signature. Close. Close enough to fool a council member skimming a stack of paperwork. Not close enough to fool someone who'd spent two years learning the specific slant of every signature that crossed this desk.

Someone had altered the log. Recently. Carefully. And whoever did it knew exactly how these records were reviewed, which meant it was someone with real access. Someone inside.

I sat back in the chair, my pulse loud in my ears, my hands not quite steady on the pages in front of me.

Dave, I thought. This ends both of us, he'd said. Now I understood, with cold, sick clarity, exactly what "this" might be.

Rhys came back on the evening of the second day.

I heard the front doors before I heard him, heavy footsteps, low voices in the entry hall, and by the time I made it to the top of the stairs he was already limping through the doorway, one arm wrapped tight against his ribs, a gash along his jaw that hadn't been properly cleaned.

"You're hurt," I said, coming down the stairs faster than I meant to, old instinct outrunning the anger for one unguarded second.

"It's nothing," he said. "Border skirmish. Handled."

"Handled," I repeated. "Two days, Rhys. You left a note telling me to handle correspondence and then you disappeared for two days and came back looking like you went through a window."

"I said it's handled." His jaw was tight, voice clipped in the way it got when he wanted a conversation over before it started.

"That's not an answer." I planted myself in front of him before he could brush past me toward the study. "What border skirmish. With who. Why did it take two days and why didn't you send word."

"Matteo—"

"I found the patrol logs," I said, and watched something in his face go very still. "The altered ones. Third week of last month. Someone changed those entries, Rhys, and I don't think it was a rival pack that did it."

The silence that followed had weight to it, a held breath stretched too thin.

"You went digging in council records," he said finally, low.

"I went digging because my husband vanishes for two days at a time and comes back bleeding and expects me to just accept whatever thin story he hands me afterward," I said, and my voice cracked on the last word, not from sadness this time but from something closer to fury. "I have accepted everything for two years, Rhys. Every cold morning. Every hand at my back that disappears the second the cameras stop. I have never once asked you for the truth, because some part of me decided a long time ago that I didn't deserve it."

"That's not—"

"I'm asking now," I said, cutting him off, my hands not shaking anymore, steady with a kind of anger I'd never let myself use on him before. "What happened out there. What did Dave move. What ends both of you if it comes out."

His face did something I'd never seen it do before. The careful stillness cracked clean through, just for a moment, and underneath it was something raw and exhausted and almost frightened.

"You don't understand what you're asking," he said, quieter now.

"Then make me understand."

"Matteo, if I tell you this, there's no putting it back," he said, and his voice actually shook on the words, rough in a way that stopped my anger cold and replaced it with something closer to dread. "You have to know that before I say anything else."

"I'm not afraid of the truth."

"You should be," he said. "I'm not protecting you from this because I think you're weak. I'm protecting you because once you know, you can't unknow it, and I don't know what it does to you. To us. To any of it."

"Rhys." I stepped closer, close enough now that I could see the exhaustion carved into every line of his face, close enough to see he meant every word of what he was about to say. "Tell me."

He looked at me like a man standing at the edge of something he'd been circling for two years.

"The patrol logs," he started, voice low, cracking around the words like they cost him blood to say, "Dave altered them because—"

The study door slammed open.

"Rhys." Sofia's voice, sharp and breathless, cut clean through whatever he'd been about to say. She stood in the doorway, hair loose, face white as bone, chest heaving like she'd run the whole length of the compound to get here.

Rhys straightened instantly, whatever had cracked open in him sealing shut just as fast. "Sofia, we're in the middle of—"

"It can't wait." She looked between the two of us, urgency radiating off her in waves. "I need both of you to listen to me right now."

"What happened," I said, dread pooling cold in my stomach, the confession I'd almost gotten out of Rhys still hanging unfinished in the air between us.

Sofia's hands were trembling. I'd never once seen Sofia's hands tremble.

"It's not the border patrol you need to worry about," she said, her voice shaking despite every effort to hold it steady. "It's what's coming for the estate tonight."